> Notes...

Rich Sutton’s debating notes on whether or not artificially intelligent robots could/should have the same rights as people.

“Ultimately, rights are not given or granted, but asserted and acknowledged. People assert their rights, insist, and others come to recognize and acknowledge them. This has happened through revolt and rebellion but also through non-violent protests and strikes. In the end, rights are acknowledged because it is only practical, because everyone is better off without the conflict. Ultimately it has eventually become impractical and counterproductive to deny rights to various classes of people. Should not the same thing happen with robots? We may all be better off if robot’s rights were recognized. There is an inherent danger to having intelligent beings subjugated. These beings will struggle to escape, leading to strife, conflict, and violence. None of these contribute to successful society. Society cannot thrive with subjugation and dominance, violence and conflict. It will lead to a weaker economy and a lower GNP. And in the end, artificially intelligent robots that are as smart or smarter than we are will eventually get their rights. We cannot stop them permanently. There is a trigger effect here. If they escape our control just once, we will be in trouble, in a struggle. We may loose that struggle.

If we try to contain and subjugate artificially intelligent robots, then when they do escape we should not be surprised if they turn the tables and try to dominate us. This outcome is possible whenever we try to dominate another group of beings and the only way they can escape is to destroy us.”

I have noted on this topic before. I know we can’t help—monetarily—everyone, but an occassional small donation to a good cause, multiplied by millions of us doing it, has an impact. Today I have chosen Médecins Sans Frontières.

Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) is an international humanitarian organization that provides essential medical assistance to people affected by conflict, epidemics, disasters, or those excluded from healthcare. Their teams offer impartial, high quality care, guided solely by medical ethics and an independent assessment of needs, often working in challenging and dangerous contexts worldwide.

If you can live without a cup of coffee for a day, or for a week, please consider donating today.

I have a notification on GitHub that I can’t clear out. Someone mentioned me on a repository for which I have no access, or it has since been deleted, or something else. The only “solution” that I have found involves installing and using gh. Why? I don’t want to!

Often times when I am driving, or not on the desktop, notes come across my mind, but never make it here. Why? More often than not, I simply forget. With that in mind I am considering recording notes, if anyhing so that I can remember them later on.

Today was Apple’s Day. They announced a new MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Apple Vision Pro, all with the new M5 Apple silicon SoC. 🥳

On a different topic, it was not F5—“a global scale and industry-leading converged application delivery and security platform”—Day, as they shared they had been breached by a “highly sophisticated nation-state threat actor”. 💀

“Attribution matters to me, I want contributors to always get full credit for their effort. This is how you preserve the git history of a project you are bringing into another project.”

I came across TIL: Merging two git projects—can’t remember how, it was an open tab—which I think is a good note to keep around here. The gist is pretty much:

cd alpha
git remote add -f  beta [beta repository URL]
git merge beta/main --allow-unrelated-histories

“‘Pig butchering’ scams resemble the practice of fattening a hog before slaughter. Victims invest in supposedly legitimate virtual currency investment opportunities before they are conned out of their money. Scammers refer to victims as “pigs,” and may leverage fictitious identities, the guise of potential relationships, and elaborate storylines to “fatten up” the victim into believing they are in trusted partnerships before they defraud the victims of their assets—the ‘butchering.’”

Today I learned. There are so many names given to scams, financial and otherwise, that one looses track. Pig butchering was one of those I missed.

The upcoming NVIDIA DGX Spark sure is a powerful little devil, in a tiny format.

“Spark delivers one petaFLOP1 of AI performance in a power-efficient, compact form factor. With the NVIDIA AI software stack preinstalled and 128 GB of memory, developers can prototype, fine-tune, and inference the latest generation of reasoning AI models from DeepSeek, Meta, NVIDIA, Google, Qwen and others with up to 200 billion parameters locally.”

It will “only” set you off $4,000 USD. When you order yours, please order one for me too. After all, it’s a mere pocket change, right?

What I like the most about the latest Ollama is that it allows for an easy updating of existing models. Before one had to delete the outdated model, then re-download. Those days are over now. I also like the simple, yet quite useful, chat interface. Not really into their Cloud offering, but I don’t have to use it.

“In December, as we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our “treat adult users like adults” principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.”

Oh dear, oh dear. Now this spells like “we want more money, and now we’ll get it from poor lonely souls.”

“The Pentagon certainly has the right to make its own policies, within the constraints of the law,” the Pentagon Press Association said in a statement on Monday. “There is no need or justification, however, for it to require reporters to affirm their understanding of vague, likely unconstitutional policies as a precondition to reporting from Pentagon facilities.”

Several news outlets (New York Times, AP, Newsmax amongst others) will not sign new Pentagon rules, which vastly limit access for credentialed media while inside the Pentagon complex.

In case you didn’t notice it, I am back to Open Sans—ah, now you noticed, I bet! I used Ubuntu Sans for a whole almost five months. Love Ubuntu Sans, but Open Sans is more… hmm, uniform? Either way, a change of mind. 😛

“There are legends of people… born with the gift of making music so true, it can pierce the veil between life and death. Conjuring spirits from the past… and the future.”

“Sinners” (★★★★☆) was the movie of choice last night with the kid. Even thought I am not a huge fan of the genre, it was a good movie to see, and a welcomed theme change from the movies we have watched previously.

I want to go back to start using email more, like I used to. I am looking into participating more on mailing lists, and overall using email more for communication for which I have been using non-asynchronous apps. I prefer to use the apps provided by the OS, as I have mentioned it before. The thing is, macOS mail app has a couple of things that the “email perfectionist” in me dislikes. A lot. I am one of those, yes. Let’s see:

• No strict threading, that is, using in-reply-to and message-id to properly create threads. It seems that the iOS/macOS Mail app will not exclusively use those, often using subjects to group emails.
• No way to set quoted text to start with the venerable > Internet “standard”. Apple Mail insists on using their colored |.

So, that’s the pickle, my pickle. Will I dust off mutt, or Thunderbird? Ugh, I don’t want to, but…

Last night was movies night with Kim. We saw “About My Father” (★★★★☆) first. It is a comedy, so we enjoyed it quite a bit. Good cast, light, but entertaining plot. I would recommend. The second movie we saw was “Ice Road: Vengeance” (★☆☆☆☆) , which was a total, and absolute flop. The only reason we finished watching it was because of the time we had already invested on it. Avoid at all cost; trust me on this one.

Mum tells me, while I wait for ông to get ready, “Take him with you, otherwise his mind will keep going bad. You know, if you leave a book on a table, untouched for a long time, it will be covered with dust. Same will happen to his mind.”

Ông tells me, while we walk, “Mum is loosing her mind. She didn’t remember Trang’s mother was in the hospital recently.” I ROFLMAO in my mind, but softly smile and nod.

Kaizen is a Japanese concept that emphasizes continuous improvement. That is, it focuses on small, ongoing, positive changes with the belief that those will lead to significant results. Another Japanese philosophy I can subscribe too.

It is not often that I see a rejection of a pull request so politely, and clearly explained. Heck, this one ought to be a first, at least for me. After a thorough explanation, the project’s owner concludes:

“I recommend closing this PR. The original implementation is secure and maintainable. Thank you for your contribution, but we must prioritize security in this security-sensitive codebase.”

Last night was “The Bourne Ultimatum” (★★★★★) night. There is no doubt, in my opinion, that this is the best movie of the original trilogy. That’s not to say the previous two were bad—after all, I rated the three the same—but this last one takes the first prize.

Even thought I went to bed late because of it, watching the movie wasn’t the reason for my 83 sleep score. Allegedly I woke up 7 times during the night, which is pretty disastrous.

I don’t know if I have said this before—which reminds me, I have considered to implement search here, but I digress—but Jimmy Kimmel is a national treasure.

“In our view, America’s leadership in science and innovation depends on independent thinking and open competition for excellence. In that free marketplace of ideas, the people of MIT gladly compete with the very best, without preferences. Therefore, with respect, we cannot support the proposed approach to addressing the issues facing higher education.”

➝ Via MIT Office of the President.

At a workplace that wholly uses Microsoft products (like O365), having access to Copilot—specifically the premium version, not the standard chat—will likely create a form of classism.

“First-class” employees, granted access to the premium tool, will gain a significant advantage. The model’s assistance will help them with tasks ranging from trivial to complex, ultimately boosting their productivity. “Second-class” employees, who lack access, will be at a significant disadvantage when it comes to efficiency and output.

Last night we re-wathed “The Bourne Supremacy” (★★★★★) which, needless is to say, because it was a re-watch, we liked very much. Kid reminded me that we “own” all of the movies; I had forgotten about that. Next, “The Bourne Ultimatum”, but that’s a note for another day.

My most used, and only, filters on the Fediverse are “#wordle” and “wordle”. They work great. I cannot begin to describe how much I dislike those silly “bragging” squares people post, over and over. Ugh!

My most favourite Spotlight function (search for a word definition on Dictionary) is broken. It is my second most used feature on Spotlight, with the first being to open applications as my Dock has only Finder and Bin. Hopefully it will be fixed soon. I would not mind if that tiny scrollbar shown above also goes away. Thank you, Tim Apple!

Yeah, Bluesky isn’t decentralised, it just wants you to believe it is. It is an illusion.

“Bluesky claims to want decentralization and composable moderation, but they still enjoy abusing the power of arbitrary banishment.”

I remember reading that Jesus said: “Fear everyone, expel the stranger, blame the poor, feed the rich, ignore the sick, sacrifice the young, love only thyself, trust only Caesar, throw lots of stones.” Right? 🙄

With the release of iOS 26, it is iOS 7 all over again. It is also Mac OS X, “the re-run”, with the release of macOS 26. Complain we must, it matters not.

“The new iOS 7 is horrible. It looks like something grade schoolers designed. The colors are too bright. It is very distracting when you have to squint looking at different apps due to the harshness […]. There is no point in keeping something that is so horrible to use.”

“Just “up"graded my iPhone to iOS 26 and I absolutely hate it. It’s visually the ugliest iOS Apple has ever produced […]. It’s so ugly I’m thinking of cancelling my iPhone Air order and looking at Samsung options.”

Behold, the master procrastinator! So shameful! The issue is dire now, and I have planned to use the end of year break—after all, I will not have anything else to do—to get this done, at all cost.

These are 100 bytes of CSS that will pretty much make any “vanilla” HMTL look good. I have tested it, and it does look good indeed!

html {
  max-width: 70ch;
  padding: 3em 1em;
  margin: auto;
  line-height: 1.75;
  font-size: 1.25em;
}

If we add an additional, but optional, 100 bytes—so, 200 bytes in total then—things can get much prettier (this works as a light theme).

h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {
  margin: 3em 0 1em;
}

p,ul,ol {
  margin-bottom: 2em;
  color: #1d1d1d;
  font-family: sans-serif;
}

That dreadful random time on a Sunday when it suddenly sinks in that tomorrow is, yet another, back to work day. 😩

For as much as I liked Steve Jobs, I didn’t know him personally. I liked (and still do) how he was presented to us. I know now that he had many issues of his own. This user comment on Hacker News made sense to me:

“One part of his legacy that will forever be misunderstood is that being brutally honest, being demanding, being abrasive is a trait that only translates to success when you are at the top. Countless mid level managers believe it is the only way to lead.

For Steve Jobs, it’s not that being an asshole was his secret sauce. It’s that his unique position allowed him to survive the downsides of his personality.”

Today marks the 14th anniversary of Steve Jobs death, at the age of 56.

I cannot stand Steam. Their webpage is shoddy, just as is their app. The games you “own” in their platform you really don’t. I made the mistake of “buying” Diablo IV and Last Epoch for desktop computers because they entised me with a great price, but never, ever, again. You get what you pay for.

While I agree that email has its advantages, each medium has its intended use based on the communication’s needs. Choosing email over messaging is like choosing sea over air traveling. After all, we don’t stop talking verbally, and use emails instead, right? Carrying a non-voice conversation that requires instant, or almost instant interaction is impossible via email. Enter messaging.

➝ Via Hacker News.

I watched “The Bourne Identity” (★★★★★) for the, well, I forgot how many times I have watched it, with the kid last night. It never gets old. It is entertaining while having “substance”, and keeping you engaged all throughout. The Bourne film franchise “series” is one of the few that, in my opinion, doesn’t get worse as new films come out. If you haven’t watched it, do. You will be in for a great treat!

An old underwear, just like any other old cloth, is very comfy to wear. I am sure you know what I am talking about. Yet, as with everything else in life, they have a finite shelf life. So, as I threw an old one away today, I remembered what my mum once told me:

“Always make sure to wear a new underwear when you go out, in case something happens to you, and are taken to a hospital. You don’t want to be ashamed having found wearing an old, beat up, one, do you?”

I never challenged her advise; I simply listened and nodded. I am absolutely sure, though, that if found in such situation, that would be the least of my worries.

Just came across daisyUI and, though perhaps overkill for anything I might need at a personal level, it looks truly amazing. It has pretty much all the components to create a uniform, powerful, beautiful looking web interface. That is, whether an application, or a website. It’s lovely!

Family elders engaged in petty fighting and family drama is so annoying! First because they do it; second because, as they are elders, there is no much I can do about it. We all have emotions, and make mistakes, and surely can get mad to each other. Now, holding grudges for as long as our elders do isn’t healthy.

I added a new recipe to my shared (with my wife and other family members) “Recipes” folder on Notes, which ruffled some feathers. My wife asked me, “Why do you keep adding recipes if you never make them? Are you waiting for me to cook them?” Secretly, between you and me, I am! 🤭

Well, well, well. It is possible, after all, to create a /boot partition on software RAID10, and been able to boot from it just fine—something I tried many times, and couldn’t do. It turns out you need to flag each drive as a bootable disk, before carving out partitions, and creating the RAID10.